Splatoon is a Nintendo series that I've enjoyed well enough, but fleetingly. Even with solid shooting mechanics and a playful gimmick revolving around quickly traversing paint-soaked battlefields, the competitive multiplayer often failed to hold my interest beyond a few weeks. Splatoon Raiders isn't the first time the series has attempted single-player, as each previous game would have a brief story campaign. But it is the first time Nintendo has built a whole game around single-player, and the looter shooter approach works so well that I hope it marks a new beginning for Splatoon that can live alongside the multiplayer games.
In a lot of ways, it's easy to imagine how Splatoon Raiders came together. It uses a lot of the basic structure of a regular Splatoon game, like varied weapon types and Salmonid enemies. Even its main heroes, the members of the band Deep Cut, hail from Splatoon 3. Yet Splatoon Raiders rearranges all these familiar parts into a new shape that is best summarized by a quote found near the beginning of the game: "All that matters now is the loot!"
Instead of splatting your fellow squid kids and competing to get the most ink coverage, you're taking on a series of PvE challenges. Some of these involve quickly gathering Power Eggs on a timer while others have you roaming a map gathering crystals to power your drilling machine, but the core goal remains the same: defeat Salmonids and get loot. It's simple but it works. Instead of competing to cover the ground with ink, your own ink color (and custom character accents) changes from stage to stage, while your Salmonid enemies are consistently spewing a sickly yellow-green goo.
Returning Splatoon fans will find a lot of familiarity here. Your core weapons, like shooters, splatanas, and dualies, are all here, as well as some weapons that make less sense in this format. The roller was my mainstay in traditional competitive Splatoon games, when I would try to help my team with maximum ink coverage, but it's much less useful while fighting off hordes of superpowered fish. I mostly stuck with rapid-fire weapons like shooters and dualies, but occasionally changed it up with a shotgun-like slosher. The weapons you find have numbered levels that generally match your current experience level, so sometimes Raiders will gently push you to try something new. If you haven't found a new version of your preferred weapon type for a while, of course you'll try out a stronger but less familiar weapon.
The real game-changer is the array of Gadgets. You have three Tank types--Speed, Power, and Tactical--which mostly define your Gadget selection. The Speed tank gives you access to the Booyarang, a spinning weapon that squirts some ink in a small radius, while the Power tank gives you Splatellites that circle around you, and the Tactical tank gives you the Shot Pot auto-turret. Each of the gadgets feel very different from each other, and you're able to develop new Gadgets as you progress through the game. I stuck mostly to the Power Tank and my favorite Gadget, the Splatellite, all throughout.
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